STIGMATA
Here's a bloody awful movie for ya
Despite mostly negative reviews - which basically indicate that what we have is a horror movie - I was pretty excited about this movie. Yeah, it does have Gabriel "the worst actor in a world that has Adam West" Byrne, but it's got a great premise, looks nice and stark, and what I've heard promises mucho Catholic-bashing. And God knows, I'm all for a little Catholic-bashing. (I kid, I kid. Some of my best friends are Catholics. But note to single men: everything you've heard about Catholic girls is a lie, and if you ever catch me dating a Catholic girl again, make a point to ask me why I bother.)
But no, it's not really Catholic-bashing, just some Catholic-skepticism. Not that any of us needed a movie to inspire us to indulge in it. The 90's have been almost completely devoid of Catholi-horror - the only other example that comes to mind is Exorcist III way back in 1990 - and I've rather missed the subgenre. This movie is enough to make me glad it went away.
Patricia Arquette stars as Frankie, a Pittsburgh (what? A movie set in Pittsburgh?) hairdresser who comes into the possession of a rosary that was stolen off of a dead Brazilian priest and sold to her tourist mother. Her mother mailed it to her as a gift, even though she's an atheist, never once hints at ever having been Catholic, and wouldn't know what to do with a rosary for the life of her. Soon enough, she finds holes punched through her wrists, and manifests spontaneous whipping wounds on her back on the subway. (Why would stigmatic wounds rip her clothes too?) Enter Father Andrew (Gabriel Byrne), a priest who the Vatican dispatches all over the world to debunk would-be miracles. It's understandable that the Vatican would want to retain credibility with a good effort at calling bullshit when they find it, but the guys in charge seem rather forceful about the point, as if they want even the incidents which support their faith repressed. They even "erase" the existence of that dead priest's church when they decide they don't want anything to do with that.
Anyway, soon enough we don't know what's taken hold of this poor lassie as she starts manifesting even more wounds, talking like a man, and writing in dead languages (which some people can apparently recognize by sound, despite claiming that nobody's spoken it in 1900 years). And all the church wants to do is silence what she has to say.
This is the kind of movie which you just know started with some executive reading about stigmata somewhere and saying "Hey, this would make a great horror movie!" And then somebody would say "Stigmata only happens to the extremely devout." And the exec would say "Nah, that wouldn't work, devout isn't sexy. How about a hairdresser?" And on and on.
It's pretty silly all around, folks. Andrew travels halfway around the world to investigate Frankie's stigmatic experiences, but gets ready to pack his bags as soon as she tells him she's an atheist. Wouldn't this just pique his curiosity that much more? We also learn that he became a priest because as a scientist, he concluded that the things he could not explain must be the work of God. Man, that's a pretty stupid scientist. No scientist worth the piss to soak him down with would cop such a lazy way of thinking; just because he doesn't understand it, he calls "God" and everything's solved? Not that he's much of a priest either; that's also a fairly stupid reason to enter the priesthood. So much for having a "calling", eh?
What's with the scene where Frankie basically tries raping Andrew? Seems rather out of character for her, even moreso when we learn about the nature of the being she's harboring. What would a rosary have to do with the transmission of such a being?
I could go on. Suffice it so say that the script by Tom Lazarus (quick, somebody stop me before I make a joke about that guy's name) and Rick Ramage sucks. But sucky scripts can be made into good movies with assured performances and good direction, right?
Well, the performances are wooden and perfunctory, and the direction? Oh, man.
Rupert Wainwright holds the reins here, and this guy clearly wants to be the Michael Bay of horror. This is not a good thing. I can understand, sort of, how one would want to film an action movie MTV-ishly. This does NOT work in horror, however; you can't build tension when you're cutting every twentieth of a second and throwing in every sound effect in the foley vaults.
Wainwright doesn't just mess up (repeatedly) this way, but in other ways which you kind of expect from a first-time director (this is his fifth film). Like the repeated (ad infinitum) images of blood flowing through water, or water "un-dripping", or Frankie running out into the middle of a busy street. And man, talk about your self-conscious symbolism. Ooh, look, she's taking a bite out of an apple (in the bathtub?)! Or worse yet, during the scenes where Frankie manifests those wounds - we see flash-cuts to the same thing actually happening to (presumably) Christ, as if we couldn't make that connection on our own. And yes, we even get to see a Cardinal try strangling somebody to death with his bare hands.
Wainwright throws every MTV-style trick in the book at us, not succeeding even once at raising the slightest chill. Okay, there's one cool underwater shot of Arquette in a bathtub; it's not very revealing, but it's pretty cool in how it uses the mirror image from the surface of the water as seen from underneath.
The techno-ish music (co-composed by cherubic no-talent Billy Corgan) doesn't help matters.
It says something about a movie when it actually tries harder to insult your intelligence than its ad campaign does. At one point, an apparently possessed Frankie says in what sounds like Italian, "the messenger is not important". It's fairly obvious that that's exactly what she's saying, and that's why it's not subtitled in the ads, because the average person can figure this one out on his own. And yet, in the movie, it's subtitled.
I'm making it sound like this movie sucks pretty badly - and make no mistake, it does - but it's not without its merit. If Ellie Cornell was black, she'd be Nia Long, who plays Frankie's best friend (who disappears about 2/3 of the way through), so she's pretty cute.
Yep, it's merit. Note the singular.
Lake Placid must step aside. Stigmata is the worst horror movie I've seen all year.